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What's the best way to clean up a BST for garbage collection?

I want to clean up the BST so I can take advantage of the garbage collector. So, to clean up the BST, is it enough to set the root to null so that I end up with a bunch of abandoned nodes with no pointers to them? Or is it better to set each node to null?

  • Are these two equivalent methods?
  • Will one of them cause a memory leak?
  • Will garbage collection be faster than another?

I am also concerned about weak link and strong link etc.

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Any object that cannot be reached on any thread will be eligible for garbage collection.

Based on this:

  • Yes.
  • Not.
  • Depends on the GC implementation. In any case, as a Java programmer, you have no control over it. All you can do is trust that he will do his job just fine. Also, setting the root to zero is O (1), while zeroing all references is O (n), where n is the number of nodes.


Output:

Just set the root to null and let the GC go through it at the right time :)

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